8
Pierre Kerszberg, University of Toulouse1
The kinship between Maine de Biran’s philosophy and contemporary phenomenology is confirmed by the latter’s most eminent representatives. Merleau-Ponty hails Maine de Biran’s philosophy as an anticipation of phenomenology because it is indifferent to the distinction between interiority and exteriority;2 Michel Henry goes so far as to say that Biran’s whole philosophy is nothing but a broad phenomenological reduction;3 and Marc Richir took inspiration from Biran’s philosophy to develop his conception of language and emotion.4 Thus, when Maine de Biran undertook to answer the question posed by the Academy of Copenhagen on the ‘utility of physical doctrines and experiments to explain the phenomena of mind and inner sense’, it is not surprising that he sided with those who deny the utility of the physical in explaining the mental. What is surprising, however, is the radicality of his position. The Academy’s question was addressed to those who still deny this utility, and Biran agrees with them to the extent that they deny it now. Nonetheless, the question left open the possibility of a future physicalist explanation of consciousness, or in any case the utility of this type of explanation in understanding the mind or soul, even if such doctrines were not presently established. Biran’s answer categorically precludes such an explanation from ever contributing to its purported goal. This subtle distinction allows Biran to strip physicalist doctrines of their cloak of utility. Indeed, the refutation of a physicalist explanation of consciousness proves more useful than anything that is understood as useful in any possible physicalist explanation (RPM 92). Such a refutation is at the service of the ‘very nature of things’, which by principle demands the absolute heterogeneity of the two orders of phenomena: the physical and the mental. All the explanatory models invented until now yield to these same facts and the laws that purportedly govern them provided that this heterogeneity is accepted. But what justifies Biran’s principled stance if not the refutation of a certain type of explanation, namely a causal explanation? For us, there is no other light, writes Biran, than that which emerges from contrasts (MDP 403); such is the method to which he adamantly adheres. Physicalism’s defect lies not in its concern for the facts and the laws that subsume these facts, but rather in its exclusive commitment to a causal explanation. If the principle of heterogeneity were posed arbitrarily to challenge this exclusivity, it would be still at the mercy of an always better causal explanation because such an explanation would always be possible in principle. Thus, what justifies heterogeneity’s superior value as a principle compared to that of causal explanation?
This very ‘nature of things’ that the principle of heterogeneity invokes is traditionally the subject of metaphysics. Does the principle of heterogeneity thus involve a break with the exact sciences of nature, in which nature is no longer that of the ipseity of things but the simple observation that things ‘are’ and that they fit within a framework of laws that describe their relations to one other? Not at all. From the precepts of Bacon’s experimental method, for example, Biran retains the false teachings of abstract reason. Metaphysics still deals with facts but with internal facts of consciousness that are equally positive as the external facts of nature described by physics; only the meaning of this positivity differs. How does one discover facts and laws that belong to an order of being where causal explanations are not possible? The way in which facts and laws are discovered in the physical sciences serves as a helpful contrast to the discovery of meaning in the sciences of the mind.
As long as the human mind is beholden to causal explanations, it is induced to establish general laws for phenomena with a haste that makes it dispense with patient observation and verification (RPM 7). Indeed, it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. Without this characteristic precipitation of imagination that outpaces the testimony of the senses, an exact science of physical nature would indeed not be possible or even conceivable as a project. Husserl’s phenomenology takes precisely this view. The mathematical science of nature is based on laws that are viewed as empirical generalizations of facts grouped together by their similarities. These facts are not, strictly speaking, simple natural facts; they are produced by experimentation, which brings out analogies. In this sense, experimentation can be seen as a free imaginative variation on the part of the physicist, similar to an eidetic; indeed, the whole science of physics can be seen as a sort of eidetic of nature. Under this view, once it is expressed in mathematical language, the connection between facts produces the eidos of phenomena. But if this view were correct, physics would be no more than a descriptive science like mineralogy or botany. Its mathematical language makes it something entirely different. In addition to ‘describing’, it ‘explains’, but its explanations do not escape ambiguity because they are not based on descriptions of fact.5 According to Husserl, experimentation in physics is a ‘strange’ eidetic variation because it operates through an eidos that the physicist possesses in advance, rather than discovering it patiently by induction. But patience is the path to clarification – clarification of an essence first perceived only faintly.
For a psychological science that must align itself with the phenomena of internal sense, however, patience is what allows it to become a science. Biran says exactly this when he flatly rejects all attempts to explain these phenomena by organic considerations, from which they are distinct if not separate. The question is to what extent the observable features of the organic body are linked to affects or passions of the soul: that is, ‘in what specific species of phenomena’ (RPM 89) we are likely to observe the double experience of the simultaneous facts of mind and body. Although the organic in itself cannot explain the soul, there will always remain signs of the soul in the organic, and it is incumbent on the mind to seek out, through these signs, the phenomena that define it. These phenomena are not simply given but rather are identified through a classification process that defines them as such: ‘the mind first seeks to link the signs that express its various faculties to so many truly distinct phenomena of its intimate sense’ (RPM 83). The psychological science that Biran advocates is thus comparable to a mineralogy or botany of the mind: it is not duped by imagination, which presupposes causes before discovering them (when in fact it invents them). What does this patient science gain in exchange? Aren’t the distinct phenomena it establishes dependent on a system of classification and division selected in advance?
The first distinct phenomenon that is perceived and can be identified as such in this eidetic of the mind is indeed the ego itself, or self-perception. I am constantly buffeted by various floating impressions that beset me on all sides in a permanent instability, and yet I observe within myself a remarkable psychological fact that gives consistency and persistence to the self: voluntary effort, which reveals the indissoluble link between will and consciousness. Escaping both the realm of the body as well as the images of the mind, voluntary effort is a hyper-organic force to which only inner experience is witness. Effort sneaks in all passive determinations of organic life, including the discovery that voluntary initiative may sustain itself without relying on sense data. Effort thus ends up living its own essence in self-reflection, and reflection in this sense is the tool of this very special eidetic of the mind where no essence rises to the level of knowledge. If knowledge of the mind were possible (RPM 54–55), it would build on the almost mechanical effect that objects have on our neurological processes. We would expect that these processes – which can in principle be identified one at a time – would in turn produce ideas and operations of the mind. The latter would thus be reduced to passive changes in perception. Inversely, however, hyper-organic force can produce an initial action that unfolds and develops into results that are immediate in that they skip over the theoretically traceable chain of causes and effects. These phenomena are reflected in the subject from which they emanate, and ‘we absolutely lack any differential expression to represent at the limit this infinitesimal fluxion from one mode to the other’ (MDP 119). Science – inspired by the experimental method and its search for causal series – transforms the human being into a purely passive receptacle (RPM 81). By contrast, reflection tends to give us the ‘first idea’6 of our voluntary activity: the idea that cannot be represented and yet serves as the foundation for all future representations because it is not self-sufficient and it cannot pose itself. How does the first unrepresentable idea come to motivate (rather than cause) representation? Representation arises from a very special desire, namely the desire that turns back on itself to trace the origin of felt effort. In order to achieve this, we must place ourselves in a perspective external to the self, so that the only thing that really subsists is an image or an abstract notion of the felt apperception of effort.
The reflective dive into the depths of self-intimacy – an eidetic devoid of image or associations of ideas – provides no access to the power of representation. This dive, though triggered by an initial act, knows no end. It passes through multiple degrees of intimacy that reflection seizes to grasp the distinct phenomena of consciousness. Indeed, in the chapter on hearing disorders, Biran emphasizes the central thesis of his book, namely that a genuine science of man must become indifferent to causal explanations (RPM 122–123). Better than any other sensory event, sound phenomena highlight the theoretically inexplicable yet observed relationship between raw nature and intelligent nature, the feeling world and the thinking world. In his analysis of hearing disorders, Biran seeks to clarify and deepen the meaning of the data that the inner self collects when there is a break in the usually regulated order between these two worlds. Sound experience in its natural state is a reminder that causal explanations are futile in accounting for the disorders and alterations of perception that physiology attempts to explain.
The most intimate experience in which the ego perceives itself as distinct is indeed sound experience.7 The sense of hearing exemplifies reflection without representation (MDP 171). There is something that the inner self sees and hears before the faculty of understanding gives it ‘voice’. Instead of departing from its native state – of which we have no idea – let us consider this experience in the state in which it lends itself to a possible representation: the clear perception of successive and coordinated sounds, that is, the music that man creates with noises extracted from raw nature. Usually this extraction goes unnoticed; we spontaneously consider sounds transposed into a musical structure as nature’s way of expressing itself and communicating with us. Biran describes the role of habitus in the intelligent activity that orders and plays with sounds as ‘certain very specific modes of passive hearing’. How do we prevent this purely affective component of hearing from being eclipsed by the intelligent activity that produces music?
Biran notes that even a completely deaf individual is stirred at the centre of his inner sensory receptors when exposed to the full force of sound impressions. Sound is invasive to the point that we probably never succeed in eliminating it completely by plugging our ears, unlike the eye, for example, which can easily be shut off from sight. Sound impressions that have such an effect as to deprive the hearing subject of its autonomy are characterized by a specific timbre. The same also occurs with individuals gifted with perfect hearing: some vocal or instrumental timbres have an affective impact that does not involve auditory perception. The timbre that generates emotional impressions is even more significant in that it is secondary and insignificant in the musical structure of sounds. Indeed, timbre, or more generally the tonal colour, is not a principle of musical organization on par with rhythm, melody or harmony. The latter weave as it were the musical thread, creating a tonal space in which its movement is heard; timbre, by contrast, remains a secondary aspect. The physical cause of the phenomenon of tonality is well known: the tonality of a sound is the product of its overtones. But in attempting to describe the timbre itself, i.e. the thing we actually hear when we hear the timbre, we quickly become perplexed. Either we identify timbre by means of its physical cause (say, the sound of an oboe), or we revert to metaphor because words fail us in the attempt to capture a truly unique sound. At any rate, in describing a sound’s timbre, we are not in a musical discourse, nor do we describe anything essential to timbre as musical. For example, the orchestration or reduction of a piece is generally perceived as a version of the same piece, not as a new musical entity. The timbre has something unique and inimitable that puts it on a different plane from all the other components of sound experience. A primitive duality emerges within the musical space in which a meaning resistant to the network of meanings arises, revealing an outside within its own interior.
The primitive duality of timbre and rhythm/melody/harmony with respect to organized and representable sounds points up another primitive duality, one that is deeper and more universal because constitutive of consciousness. Hearing is twofold: it establishes a close relationship between the voice and hearing, the sensory expression of the relationship between activity and passivity that is characteristic of consciousness, companionship with oneself in a shared dialogue between one’s soul and that of others. With respect to myself, I am at once active and passive: the voice that projects and the ear that hears. On the one hand, I have the power to create impressions in myself, since I have the power to give myself auditory sensations, to hear the sounds that my voice produces. On the other hand, however, this activity is saturated with passivity. Although unlimited in principle, my activity is limited in fact because it is linked to nature. While I have within me the theoretical power to produce all the sounds that I can hear, there are certain sounds that I cannot produce as a physical matter. Moreover, since there is always a gulf between the act that I perform and the result produced by this act, my act is always surpassed by the result in the sounds that I produce. Yet sound, like consciousness, is an act. Although we may be passive with respect to the sounds we hear, we only hear the sounds that we can somehow produce by reproducing them, at least theoretically.
Sound is subjective reality, too close to thought for thought to make it an object and know it other than by an act. But the two registers of this subjective reality, hearing and voice, mirror one another. Voice is a gesture of the body, which in its materiality is inadequate to the sound form, but which nonetheless tends towards this form. It does so in a way that goes beyond the sound form: it creates a dynamic sound space, similar to the visual space. As Maurice Blanchot clearly stated: ‘Voice is thus not only the organ of subjective interiority, but rather the resounding of a space open to the outside.’8 Between sound and vocal gesture, there is a kind of reciprocity, one contours to the other such that vocal gesture outlines sound without pronouncing it. Biran wrote: ‘Auditory perceptibility is much more related to the active organ that repeats internally and imitates first, as by a kind of instinct of sympathy, the sounds that strike the ear, than to the passive sense that receives immediate impressions’ (MDP 172). The active organ, the voice, appears initially in a kind of passive activity, imitation. The vocal instrument ‘repeats the outside sound and echoes it’, so that the impression is internally reflected and intensifies in one’s interior. Thus, the attention that we direct towards an external sound that reaches our ear is meaningless without the inner reflection that reproduces it. When the sound is reproduced internally, it is already almost immediately a memory. The active echo-like repetition expands the present, which now includes an infinitesimal difference from itself – an almost immediate memory of the present. What becomes of this immediate memory, which is as it were glued to the extended present, when it detaches from the present and invites us to pay attention to and reflect upon an organized series of sounds (melody or speech) that we have heard? The audible and the vocal then compete with each other, engaging in a game of eclipses whereby attention and thinking dominate each other in turn. If thinking dominates attention, the timbre reverberates and persists, as it were, on its own, without any recall effort, in the passive imagination. If instead we pay attention to what has taken place, voice predominates, i.e. ‘tone, accent, measure, all things we can imitate and reproduce’ (MDP 178), in short, rhythm. The imitable (vocalizable) part of sound is the framework of this sound, and this framework is ‘an identity of power, which is that of our own being’. In short, the voice consists of an active part and a passive part: the active part mimics the sounds that come from the outside, whereby our own being is manifested in the slight delay with respect to the passive part. The passive part, by contrast, does not imitate anything and corresponds to a sensation that determines our being in an immediate and uncontrollable way. What is heard (physical sound) is not heard (as a function of the understanding) unless it is repeated in purely potential kinaesthesia, i.e. ‘oral keys’ (MDP 181) or moving parts of the mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, etc. in which our entire being is engaged. Potential kinaesthesia are reminiscent of childhood and the moment when we start talking and hear ourselves for the first time. Finally, when thought achieves understanding in ‘the regular action of thought’, it does so against the backdrop of a ‘kind of speech that we speak softly to ourselves’. When this happens, the voice function is not exercised, yet ‘oral keys are pressed and put into play’.
As a purely potential kinaesthetic habitus, the framework of understanding (interior sound imitating exterior sound) is thus not a product of passive imagination; not only does it not physically repeat what is heard, but it does not ‘pronounce’ anything in imagination. Organic corporeality and imagination are taken out of play, leaving only kinaesthesia that are purely potential, but that take action as potential. If they did not, the interplay of the vocal and the audible would never free itself from its interiority to become constituted and recognizable meaning. The voice, which at first is enclosed in the strangely hollow cavity that is the head, initially occupies no space precisely because it resonates in a head that gives the impression of being empty. But once it is propagated outside, the voice becomes audible like any other sound that strikes the ear without declaring its origin. The voice situates the head in space; as a result, the head is filled, organic physicality reclaims its rights, and meaning is able to constitute itself by the interplay of imagination that situates my head vis-à-vis other heads.
However, as a series of organized sounds that never reaches the level of a representational discourse, music essentially involves feelings and the nuances (accents) of feeling, without any involvement of ideas (MDP 183). In this sense, it’s the flip side of conceptual thinking, which also navigates between two registers: concepts and sense data.
Cognition – the ability to construct – precedes recognition.9 Forming a concept is tending to recreate a sense datum as if it had never existed. But if consciousness indulges the pretention of believing itself at the origin of sensory consciousness, it is only by default. Indeed, concepts could never completely capture sense data; the latter are concrete and rich, while the former are empty and abstract. The concept is always filled by the sensible before the sensible is exhausted; indeed, the sensible is inexhaustible. Thought attempts to reduce sense data to its operation with a view to constituting the objective world. But if in constituting the object, thought captures it incompletely, it is because thought is unable to capture itself completely; all it can do is see itself at work in a work that surpasses it. Concepts derive from the union between thought and an exterior given – a union that lacks the legitimacy of a duly recognized and registered paternity; concepts are the illegitimate children of this union. However, constructive thought is not the only form of thought. There is another form of thought whose paternity is confirmed by the very experience of thought in its own acts: creative thought. Musical thought is the prototype of this kind of thought. Indeed, when applied to sound, thought encounters a material that is its closest relative. Thought can perform its pure acts upon sound with an immediate spontaneity. Hearing creates the given, generating it instead of reconstructing it. Sight and intelligence presuppose this given as a spectacle that they do not produce. Musical thought, although not conceptual thought, returns to the source of all thought. In doing so, it captures sensation in its most concrete quality. Thus, sound and the sound form symbolize the act by which consciousness constructs the world by creating it.
Before focusing on voice, body gesture is musically present in response to sound in the generality of its vital space. The sound form retains from this body gesture only a rhythm, i.e. the alternation of its tensions and releases, its restraints and impulses, which traces an imaginary and symbolic curve in the sound space. But among all musical gestures, vocal gesture is the one that is embodied immediately in this curve; it thus conveys vital activity before becoming the realizing agent of the will. The voice is a subtle gesture that is an agent of expression because the will controls it. Biran explains how reflective consciousness gradually takes control over the spontaneous cry and subjects it to its own laws. The voice becomes the embodiment of the will; the will recognizes itself in vocal gesture, which mirrors the will itself. Better still, the voice becomes a spiritual gesture that regulates other bodily gestures, as well as an instrument of self-control. Yielding to the vocal gesture, the body remains motionless and empties its passions. This immobility is the moment when the purely potential habitus appears, when it acts while remaining potential; it is also the moment when the body stands at attention, ready to listen.
In the modern sense, ‘entendre’ means perceiving by hearing. This meaning has supplanted the old verb ‘ouïr’ while maintaining its connotations from the Old French ‘pay attention to (what someone says)’ and the seventeenth-century ‘perceive by the intellect’. ‘Prêter son attention’ (which means ‘paying attention’, or literally ‘lending one’s attention’) is making attention available for some task for a specified time. ‘Entendre’ is ‘to hear’, ‘accept with favour’, while ‘écouter’ (‘to listen to’) derives from ‘auscultare’ (‘listen carefully to’, ‘intently attempting to hear’). Juxtaposed against this etymology, listening to music is a remarkable phenomenon because the listener (as well as the composer or performer, for that matter) cannot suspend the passage of time, which defies its resolute attempts to hear. The passage of time is a constantly ongoing process of ever-new productions of consciousness. Every act of listening entails grappling with the constant evanescence of the present, with time as continuous uninterrupted flow, as a constant and regular series of ‘nows’ fastened to one another. Riveted to the flow of the sound phenomenon, the auditor has no time to modify the present imposed from outside. She is not at liberty to organize the timing of her reception, unlike a reader or a museum art goer that can return, resume, linger or otherwise skim, skip over, shorten. In music, it is impossible to return to the moment in which one lost concentration, to dwell on a passage that seemed beautiful; it is already gone, continuously pushed into an increasingly distant past, at an ever greater distance from the present that continues producing novelty. It is impossible to remember a passage of music when the music, obstinately, continues to play.
Yet memory is also implicated in the process of listening. Without memory, hearing would be a succession of moments disjoint from one other (RPM 55–57). Biran criticizes all conceptions of sensory memory as a weak perception of the original sensation. These conceptions are based on a causal explanation. Under these conceptions, once the object that first caused the sensation disappears, the reproduction of the sensation produces the same sensorial impact that originally created the sensation, only in an attenuated form. To such conceptions of memory Biran opposes a conception of the soul as active force: ‘The same repetition that imperceptibly wears out, alters and erases passive sensation and all the subordinate faculties which originate in it, serves on the contrary to perfect, illuminate, and develop the mind’s perception, as well as all the intellectual operations whose veritable principle or source is the soul’s motor activity’ (RPM 55–57). ‘Perception’ is a word that covers a very broad spectrum of meanings, from sensation to cognition and concept. However, perception is and can only be present. In the philosophical tradition, time is kept at a distance as if it did not exist, or as if perception did not take time into account. The alliance between perception and the present within this philosophical tradition is forged by the primacy that it accords to sight over hearing. Indeed, the relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’ is straightforward. The relationship between ‘hearing’ and ‘perceiving’, however, is more complex. If perceiving means having direct and present contact with an object, it obviously does not encompass hearing. Does the perception of a melody consist in the perception of one note followed by another? A high-pitch note, a low-pitch note, a shrill note, a weak note, a short note, a long note, etc.? At no point do I perceive a symphony, and yet I hear it. When Biran identifies perception in a series of sensations modified by the mere passage of time, he invites us to think about the deeper meaning of this enlargement of the present that music creates: how, by the act of listening, does hearing also become perceiving?
The answer is that the past cannot grow weaker because the remembrance of a melody and the sounds that make it up is the remembrance of an act. The remembrance of an act contrasts with the fleeting remembrance of an impression. The remembrance of an impression fades with the impression itself, but the remembrance of an act is still the very same act. If the sensorial impressions that compose a melody disappear one after the other, we nonetheless retain the power to recreate its form – a power that we can always exercise again. Through its remembrance, the act is thus split into two acts. We can describe these two acts as a succession that takes place within us, relying on the conceptual tools that Husserl utilized in his considerations on the intimate consciousness of time. Act I: everything begins with sound vibrations that come from the outside (MDP 182); the impressions thus created have the unique feature of being preserved by the auditory organ through its natural vibrational tendencies that keep the movement going. Act II: the preserved movement would dissipate in a diminishing wave motion if it were not supported by the voice that accompanies hearing. At the conclusion of these two acts, sounds are strictly speaking perceived. Two sound series unfold in parallel: on the one hand, the sound series recorded in the exact present by the inner movement of the auditory sense; on the other hand, the sound series that is preserved in the primary memory that is ‘tacked on to’ this exact present. Obviously, the primary memory can only precisely reproduce the order of the sounds perceived in the present if we posit a form of listening that records absolutely everything in an uninterrupted series of exact presents. For this reason, primary memory is supplemented by ‘judgement, which operates by comparing or assessing the relationship that successive sounds have with each other’. Judgement perceives the relationship between sounds the way that successive sounds are first perceived in listening. The power to reactivate a musical structure implies a significant shift from attention to reflection, without which the two series of sounds would always remain foreign to one other: put another way, a ‘first idea’ must precede and inform future cognitive relations; or put still another way, appreciation is informed by and foreshadowed in an association that preceded it. How does this shift from attention to reflection work? Reflection is the subjective act that distinguishes the result of the act from the act itself, so that the subject can take credit for the result by connecting it with her own power. It is a double apperception insofar as the actual perception is foreign to the result of the act. For its part, attention obscures the sensation of performing the act in favour of its sensory outcome, which then prevails over that sensation. Attention focuses first on successive sounds – the sensory outcome, which is also ‘the motive of the first association’. Thought then takes over for this first association and allows it to develop into appreciation via ‘the inner active modes’.
When I listen to music, I sometimes find myself concentrating on the perception of a particular sequence of notes or chords. This is especially true at the beginning of a piece. But the effort required to sustain this concentration can be overwhelming and ultimately inhibiting. I then immerse myself in the memory of what I have heard by trying not to hear the fleeting sounds that I am given to hear now (if they were just given to me in mass, this diversion would not be possible). Decisive here is what we might call the attentional drift. It happens occasionally in everyday life that musical phrases or melodies arise suddenly in a flux of thoughts that do not have any a priori relationship with them. The inverse situation is seemingly more common: that imaged thoughts arise suddenly while one listens to music – figurations that are unrelated to what is heard. In both cases, we observe a game of eclipses whereby perception and emotion overshadow each another in turn. I listen to this song, and I can look out the window and watch the passage of clouds, think of a poem, and look forward to seeing a friend tomorrow – I daydream without letting myself simply be lulled by the music: the driving force of the soul is still there, in the form of a basso continuo. From time to time, I turn my attention back to the music and then let it go adrift again. Psychology may well discern paradigmatic musical structures that awaken characteristic images, and that are themselves determined by the past experiences of the listener. In the attentional drift, by contrast, everything occurs in the present in intervals of thought superposed on the musical flux itself. Each phase of the drift coincides with the need for a cognitive appraisal of the relationship between the sounds. Either the listener zones out despite his efforts to remain attentive to the expressive content, or zones out without even realizing it. Whatever the modality of the zoning out, conscience tackles the central cognitive problem of a temporal flux by living it. How does the perception of a succession become a succession of perceptions? How is a past present in the present, such that the listener is not inexorably lost in a tonal chaos? Phenomenologically, the interval of the drift is when I quasi-hear the sound. In the quasi-hearing – as in the visual perception of a thing that is not there in the flesh10 – the thing that I hear is given neither as existing nor as not existing; that is, it is not given in any positional modality but with a modification of positionality. As for the music itself, as a temporal object, it drifts in its own way thanks to its organized system of modulations. The fundamental fact is that these two drifts could never coincide or overlap perfectly. If they coincide, the music would not be ‘alive’; it would not capture my attention before lending itself to my reflection.
Attention and reflection impose themselves intermittently in turn. This does not mean, as Biran noted, that attention and reflection cannot be exercised simultaneously. The two parallel series of sounds can actually coincide at a particular time, but this coincidence never excludes a past or future contrast. This is why the double series of sounds, based on the double exercise of attention and reflection, which in turn is reflected in the double exercise of hearing and voice, may be generalized for the most complex as well as the most basic musical structures. The melody can thus provide the backdrop for the harmony and vice versa.
The simultaneous occurrence of attention and reflection is, however, subject to a condition: that the ear be already accustomed to hearing a series of sounds. Without this prior habituation, memory would not place its own series in parallel with the original series. For a subject that is beginning to realize the potential of the self in the initial emblematic action of reflection, everything begins with a sort of basso continuo over which neither consciousness nor even the will have control (CDM 90–92). No one has ever escaped this bass, which is also a base in the deepest sense, such that the first hint of the self that is exposed in this nascent reflective experience does not differentiate one self from another. Thus, music has, in and of itself, a universal scope that addresses all of humanity, even if in fact it only invites and mobilizes reflection if it draws upon an already acquired and culturally determined habituation.
The more the senses feel, the less intelligence thinks and discerns. How do we think about this lived fact that everyone immediately experiences, without relying on a theoretical basis which would be illusory? Maine de Biran’s analysis reveals that sound experience offers the most appropriate way to think about this question. A given sound is the cause of a given experience within me, but the meaning of what I hear lies in the erasure of the cause: the impact retained in the inner experience of hearing. The erasure of the cause is coupled with a failure to escape the grip of sound completely. Losing its role as external cause, sound becomes the condition of a wholly inner shock. Biran invites us to imagine the beginning of life as a purely emotional state that only becomes more magnified with the habits of maturity: a state that is unknowing and unenlightened, that is, a kind of grand habitus (an absolutely primitive cause) without an identifiable beginning. To borrow a term from Heidegger, let us call this state the Stimmung, which precedes absolutely, is impossible to grasp through intuition and has no identifiable beginning in consciousness. Heidegger immediately characterizes the Stimmung as the tonality of existence without distinguishing the tonality from the timbre. In fact, the Biranian distinction allows us to compare it more fundamentally to the timbre of a sound wave that never ceases to ring, in the final forgetting of the substantial component that it transmits. For this reason, the timbre cannot by nature become the object of attention. We are transfixed by these affective dispositions imposed by the timbre, which a retroactive grasp (a representation) from the subject cannot move past. We are not only affected by these affective dispositions; we become them without noticing it. When we exercise thought and the sense, these unnoticed products of life remain united. But the impossibility of a retroactive grasp does not prevent us from making an effort to comprehend them. This effort comes closest to succeeding when these products become recognizable by certain ‘sympathetic’ signs that completely invade the intimacy of our lives. It is possible that the unnoticed products may pass themselves off as something that has been noticed in order to appear as ‘objects’ within a particular tonality; hence the objective illusion of owning them and acting upon them to condition them to a particular mood. In reality, they only give the timbre of our existence, and although absolutely intimate, they seem to come from the outside due to a kind of fatum. Because they are indifferent to things and images, these habits are characterized by instability, charm turning on a whim into disgust or vice versa, love into hate, etc. They therefore do not fix any destiny, even if it seems that one cannot escape them. Their semblance of objectivity is the only way in which a purely potential kinaesthetic habitus comes to manifest itself as a possibility. More specifically regarding music, there is not and there never will be a dictionary capable of translating unequivocally each musical form into a corresponding affect, but the always failed attempt at translation is the life of thought inasmuch as it is consubstantial with music.
This Stimmung coloured by timbre at first seems purely private and incommunicable in its changing immediacy through the intermediary of language. However, as evidenced by affective experiences such as night-time dreams, the Stimmung can still seem like a product of the passive imagination (RPM 149). It is then akin to a belief tethered to immediate affect. This Stimmung – which is original belief, or a sort of mechanical faith – differs from the intelligence that rationalizes its grounds for belief and that is preceded by which faith. The Stimmung communicates with our purely sensory nature (RPM 143). Biran nonetheless discovers that, although recalcitrant to language, this continuous bass, which never ceases to intensify throughout life, ultimately exceeds the limits of a private sensation. While it is never expressed, it nevertheless seeks expression through the voice. It is intersubjective because in each of its moments (or each of the passions it induces) it seems to correspond to a particular manner of speech (RPM 123). My manner of speech can be imitated to a certain extent, thereby inviting others to sympathize with it (me) even if they do not understand it (me). The sympathetic signs that I experience within me seek expression; they seek to empathize with other souls in order to be heard. The original belief that occurs in my conscience is an appeal for communication with all those who can hear the signs in my sympathetic signs. If the Stimmung exists for each of us individually, with its changing phases that are always unique to it, its accent is disseminated and heard as ‘this profound cry of the soul, which all souls hear and to which they all reply in unison’.
1 The following abbreviations are used in this article: The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man (‘RPM’); Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, Œuvres III. Paris: Vrin, 1998 (‘MDP’).
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, New York: Humanity Books, 2001, pp. 72, 84. [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, J. Deprun (ed.), Paris: Vrin, 1978, pp. 61, 76.]
3 Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body, Dordrecht: Springer, 1975, p. 18. [Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps, Paris: PUF, 1965, p. 25.]
4 Marc Richir, Phénoménologie en esquisses, Grenoble: J. Millon, 2000, pp. 350–351, 419–420.
5 E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences, Dordrecht: Springer, 1980, §11, pp. 73–74.
6 Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l’étude de la nature, Œuvres, VII, Paris: Vrin, p. 368.
7 For a detailed analysis of the role of sound experience in Maine de Biran, see A. Devarieux, Maine de Biran. L’individualité persévérante, Grenoble: J. Millon, 2004, pp. 17–20, 291–304.
8 M. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation (Theory and History of Literature), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p. 386.
9 See G. Brelet, Le Temps Musical, Paris, PUF: 1949, pp. 480–481.
10 Husserl describes this perception in §111 of the first book of Ideen, ‘Quasi’ translates ‘gleichsam’: no actual object is seized upon, but instead precisely a picture, a fictum.